Dotmusic

» see dotmusic.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Dotmusic went online on 1 June 1995 as the web arm of Music Week, the trade paper the British record industry read to find out what its own business was doing. That is an unglamorous parentage and it shows in the early site, which was mostly chart tables and industry notices aimed at people who bought records for a living. In December 1998 it was relaunched as something aimed at the people who bought records for themselves, with news and long interviews, and it worked immediately.

What it had that nothing else in Britain had was the chart. The UK singles chart was a national event with a Sunday radio broadcast attached, and Dotmusic published it online with weekly commentary from James Masterton alongside it. Andy Strickland edited the site. For several years around the turn of the century it was the default place a British music fan went on a Sunday evening to see what had moved.

It also ran Dotmusic On Demand, which sold downloads for money at a point when almost nobody in Britain had worked out how to do that legally. This was two or three years ahead of the iTunes Store reaching the UK, and it ran into the obvious problem: the catalog was thin because the labels were still terrified, and the audience was busy getting the same songs elsewhere for free.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the message board ~

The forum outgrew the site. By the early 2000s the Dotmusic boards were among the most heavily used in the UK, and from 1999 the regulars started organizing DotCons, meetups in Manchester and London that had nothing to do with the company running the servers. A trade magazine's website had accidentally grown a community that treated the magazine as incidental.

What sat there was not a comments section under articles but a place where a scene's next generation was already talking. Alex Donne Johnson posted on the boards before founding RWD, which went on to become one of the defining publications of UK garage and grime.

~ a chart i was not counting ~

The UK singles chart is a domestic institution, and Dotmusic's whole value proposition sat on top of it. In 1995 I was eleven and three years away from my first modem. By 2003, when Yahoo bought the site, I was at university on a Turkish connection and the boards I posted on were donanimhaber and frmtr, where the currency was hardware and my signature was a list of my own components. A weekly British sales chart was not something I had any reason to refresh.

~ the fold ~

BT bought Dotmusic in 2002, which put a music magazine's website inside a telephone company. That lasted about a year. Yahoo bought it from BT on 28 October 2003 and had no intention of running a second music brand, so Dotmusic was absorbed into Yahoo's Launch portal before the end of the year and the name stopped being used.

Launch itself was already living on borrowed time by then, and Yahoo eventually sold that too. The chart moved to the Official Charts Company's own site and the news moved to the NME and the BBC. The message board simply ended, which is the part nobody buys and nobody can move.

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